What does Virtual Reality Need to Succeed

For the past year Virtual Reality, or VR for short, has been a very hot topic within the gaming community. It has been an especially popular topic for PC hardware providers such as AMD and Nvidia. VR headsets have to hit a frame rate of 90 frames per second minimum or the user can suffer from motion sickness and no one wants that. Great graphics at that frame rate can require serious hardware. A year ago, a VR computer could cost around $1000, not counting the six hundred to eight hundred dollar headset. In the past 3 months AMD and Nvidia have both released VR ready graphics cards that were cheap and promised high end card performance. AMD released the RX 480 that promised performance rivalling the R9 series but for only $200 dollars.

In the community of VR, hardware is a topic that comes up often and is one of the bigger prerequisites for VR. However, the argument of this post is that VR will stay in the realm of enthusiasts until it is embraced by major studios. Steam has a section dedicated to VR games full of games that look like tons of fun. A majority of these games are small and based around the HTC Vive, which requires the player to move around a space. For VR to elevate from enthusiasts to a serious video game platform major studio needs to make their games compatible with VR. However, HTC Vive-”move around the room” style VR will not be the VR that takes off for the masses.

At E3 this year, Bethesda showed off Fallout 4 in VR. But these open world games would shine with an Oculus Rift-sit down style VR because they have large open world environments, walking around/teleporting around would get old and can be clunky for larger environments. Now would also be a good moment to mention that, like myself, not everyone has a 15ft by 15ft room laying around for a VR experience. VR is still a new technology for gamers and the stand up and move around experience is the most exciting for us right now, but the sit down VR is what will break into the main-stream for gamers.